The Farrellite dynasties

For the first 1500 years, Christianity was made of episcopal hierarchies, all of whom agreed that they were the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, rightwise heirs to the upper room on Pentecost. The Reformation did a bit to disrupt that, but the attitude was still there, and contributed in no small part to the Thirty Years' War. As far as I can tell, denominationalism only really arises in America, where none of the colonial state churches became hegemonic in the federal period - forcing the churches to coexist, compete as equals, and acknowledge that they don't have exclusive monopolies.

This complicates things a bit, because Andalusada's religious history is different enough (for one thing, England and Scotland are still Catholic...) that the "I'm okay, you're okay" consensus of American religious life won't evolve. And yet the world would be a somewhat less interesting place if the variety of religious experience was less varied, no?

So, in a leap of logic a month or so back, I blurted out a solution: the Farrellite dynasties.

Before dynastic polity: the Unitas Fidelium

Oliver Farrell was a Great Man of History, a legend and a saint, but he was above all a fallible human, and made some mistakes. One of his biggest was that he ordained just a little bit too freely.

That's the problem with ordination, especially of bishop-equivalents: it's hard to take it back if and when they start ordaining people you disagree with. And the French apostles [who?], the first true "Farrellites," disagreed with each other about a lot of things. Mostly each other.

By the time the nobility started to rally around John the Beloved for the coming war, the Farrellite community, the dream of a centralized church was hopeless. The arguments were too deep. It's mostly due to the efforts of one Jean-Baptiste [who?] that there even was a coherent French Farrellite cause during the Wars of Religion, by his effort at establishing the Unitas Fidelium - "the Unity of the Believers" - and its most famous distinctive: the collective Eucharistic fraction.

His only real problem was that he died, and the Unitas Fidelium lost the war. Without any center that could hold, succession feuds and personality clashes drove the French Farrellites to tear the Unitas Fidelium apart like the Eucharistic bread. Everybody had a hand in it.

Crypto-Farrellitism and the dynasties

By the time the Most Christian Kingdom was assertive about that, Farrellitism had been selectively bred for disunity. The heretics had always been prone to leadership struggles; the Inquisitors learned to cull them when they tried to set them aside. Entire pays were muted and burned because their leadership had dared try to cooperate with each other; by contrast, anathematical churches (hardliners who refused to cooperate on principle) were usually passed over by the Inquisitors, except for a few times when one sect implicated another out of spite.

Farrellitism had become crypto-Farrellitism. Its believers passed themselves off as Catholics for their own safety, much like the Waldensians 400 years earlier. And of course there were leadership issues, because not only were they still Donatists, they had a much smaller pool of qualified leaders. Of necessity, different places adopted different polities for the sake of survival. Some sects lost their lineage altogether, and carried on without them (often abandoning all sacraments in the process.) One or two adopted priests who left the Roman fold for the Farrellite cause (and usually died at the stake shortly thereafter.) And some, for the sake of maintaining their succession, turned to nepotism. From such apostolic incest was dynastic Farrellitism born.

So what the hell is a "dynasty," anyways?

The Radical Reformation gave rise to over 57 varieties of Anabaptists, who are this side of being ethnoreligious groups (Anabaptists don't have family trees, they have family wreaths) and are generally named after the single charismatic or influential 16th-century martyr that they consolidated around: the Amish, the Mennonites, the Hutterites, and there are others that slip my mind just now. Where the Farrellites break from the Anabaptists is in that they have a continuity of leadership, usually all from the same family, tracing their apostolic lineage through the Unitas Fidelium back to Farrell himself.

• An apostolic succession, variously styled, passed down through a very small community (often a single family.) Of necessity, the current Dynast is held to a very high personal standard, and accordingly looked up to as a moral and spiritual exemplar.
• Dynastic polity. (In the absence of Methodism, a variation of connexional polity is totally going to be labeled "dynastic.") Because dynastic sects have historically been quite small, there's usually no need for too much administration, and what the Dynast says usually goes. The flip side of this is also usually true: because the sect is usually rather self-contained, it's perfectly normal for congregants to discuss issues directly with the dynasty they follow.
• Oft-referenced historical continuity. Protestant denominations feel rather ahistoric: what unites them is rather intangible stuff like theology. Not so Farrellite dynasties. Many dynastic Farrellites can rattle off their apostolic succession back to Farrell himself, and account for most of their martyrdoms too. And not having thought to share this much, a lot of this continuity is unique to the dynasty; it's perfectly normal for a dynastic Farrellite to know nothing about the history and experience of a different dynasty.
• A sacred folk musical tradition. French Bibles were historically rarer in Andalusada than IRL, and the Farrellites were often rather more rural; as such, a great deal of dynastic religious life is in its oral tradition. First and foremost is song: dynasties have bodies of songs all their own, either composed within their tradition or modified from other melodies as the words were corrupted.

This kind of structure is pretty common worldwide, but it's almost alien to Christianity IRL; the only example that comes to mind readily from the Christian tradition is the Doukhobors. Structurally, they're more akin to a Sufi tariqa (complete with silsila) - or, perhaps best of all, their namesake and inspiration: a Hasidic dynasty.

Dynastic theological style

Pretty much uniquely, old French Farrellitism has been crypto-Farrellitism, which has forced them to be distinctive in a bunch of different ways:

• Dynastic theology is very conscious of duality. To be a French Farrellite meant a dual life, a life of carefully maintained lies, a life in the shadows and blind spots and places between labels and categories. Dynastic faith is never going to escape that. While I've thought of the Farrellite tradition as much more Zwinglian (with the Reformed clarity fetish), the dynasties have to live with ambiguities that lead them in Lutheran directions sometimes. A Farrellite dynasty is totally going to reinvent the concept of simul justus et peccator.
• Dynastic theology tends to be quirky, grassroots and Catholic-influenced. While they weren't of Rome, dynastic laity were uniformly in it, and well-catechized enough to pass. To a much greater degree than IRL, Farrellite theology responded to French Catholicism's issues of the day, even if obliquely. (A lot of Catholic sensibilities carried over into dynastic faith, too; I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them believe in consubstantiation, for instance, even if they deny that the bread and wine is only the Body and Blood.)
• Lots of devotional writing. Early on, Farrellite dynasties learned that systematic theology was a form of suicide by Inquisitor. Most of their doctrine and systematics quickly passed into folklore and oral tradition. What they published, by contrast, was theologically unremarkable and stressed the inner life (again, the internal/external dichotomy.)